The $300 Lemon

The lemon tree:  Look!  A lemon!

Marieta screamed in the backyard this morning.

That’s the first thing I remember from the haze of my mental fog after crashing at 4 am last night and slumbering for five unsatisfying crusty-eyed hours.

Startled by her scream (or screams — perhaps I slept through the first few), I did seriously contemplate rolling over and going back into my slumber because — truth be told — we aren’t nice human beings when mindlessly wrapped in a blanket tucked into the fetal position.  Somehow selfless humanity prevailed over selfish instinct, and I mustered up enough manhood to slink out of a cozy bed and wobble downstairs in response to the echo of alarm.

Huh?  What was that?  Where was she?  What happened?  Did the dumb cat finally get run over?  Who am I?  Why am I here?

There before me was the sight of ecstasy.  Marieta was standing out in the backyard on a perfectly glorious 78-degree blue-skied Saturday morning gazing at our tiny lemon tree like Johnny Pitt and Brad Depp had morphed into a single love lust and had entered our home confessing some deep-seeded passion; only the subject that leering wasn’t a person but rather a plant, or make that — a tree.  Our tiny adorable worthless fucking lemon tree, that scattercluck of a useless vine that had cost me $17.95 at the plant nursery a distant 13 years ago, that I non-producing fake-ass fruit tree I wanted to chop down with a sledgehammer 900 times since then, had finally….GIVEN BIRTH.

Look!  A lemon!

Well, screw me silly.  It was a lemon!  Or so it seemed.  I wasn’t so sure.

This stupid stick of a sick angst-instilling plant hasn’t grown an inch since we first bought her when we moved into this house back in 2004.  No one damn inch.  No lemons.  No fruit.  It has produced nothing, this despite regular multi-weekly watering which I estimate has probably cost well over a couple of hundred dollars (4x per week multiplied by 660 weeks, which is like 2,500 waterings, plus an $18 bag of fertilizer every few years, plus the irrigation system being serviced annually, plus all the personal wear and tear of standing outside with a water hose in my hand quenching the thirst of this worthless cocksucker of a plant or tree that’s sapping me of my money and my sanity.

When I see that stupid plant, I don’t see a lemon tree.  I see a middle finger.

But — it’s a lemon!!!

So.  Persistence paid off.  Yeah, you may not be able to get blood from a stone.  But you can get a lemon in the Las Vegas desert.  Provided you’re willing to invest $300 or so and wait 13 years.

Wait.  Something’s wrong with this picture.  Aren’t lemons yellow?  Why is the fruit green?

Did we buy a lime tree instead and get taken?

I’d go back to the store and demand my money back.  But the plant nursery that sold us this “lemon tree” went out of business in the Great Recession of 2008 and is now a proctologist’s office.

When life deals you a lemon, make limeade.